Saline River at Mill Pond Park

In late April, City of Saline, Michigan dignitaries re-dedicated a newly built bridge over the Saline River in the city’s Mill Pond Park.  The Bowley Bridge and surrounding river bank had been damaged during a recent flood.  Midwestern Consulting was asked to provide design and construction project  management for new plantings, soil erosion control and a new steel structure. The re-dedication ceremony celebrated the opening of the new bridge and its heritage.

Midwestern Consulting was the lead consulting engineer for the bridge replacement and bank stabilization project.  The project consisted of removal of the original Bowley Bridge and replacement with ADA approach ramps as well as 100 feet of stream stabilization/restoration. The City provided the conceptual design and selected what materials to use.  Midwestern Consulting provided engineering design of the shoreline improvements and approach ramps. Highlights of the project include the use of Rosetta Stone block and Envirolok vegetated sandbags (both used along the stream banks) and creation of a flat, easy access area to the water’s edge for kids.

Photo courtesy of SalinePatch

The Economics of Place - buy at Amazon.com

New from the Michigan Municipal League:  The Economics of Place: The Value of Building Communities Around People

This is a collection of essays about planning the future of Michigan in general and Detroit in particular. Re-invention, re-vitalization, re-generation, re-population (maybe resurrection is more apt) is necessary to redefine our economy and redevelop our state. “Creating a ‘sense of place’ is at the core of this change and the authors readily illustrate that vibrant places will attract talent and bring economic growth.”

Planetizen reviewed this book  and described it as an “arts-driven regeneration plan for Michigan like a modern day Magna Carta…”

This book may be more of a sourdough starter than a Magna Carta, but it is an important collection of thoughts.  But an “arts-driven” plan is too narrow in scope.  The early stages of the plan should focus on developing a mixture of land uses at a higher density that will create and support local jobs and services.

A chapter in the book written by Dr. Soji Adelaja and Mark Wyckoff, “Why the economics of ‘place’ matters” explains that “the term ‘sense of place’ is used to describe not so much physical geography or the attributes of that geography, but the emotional response one has to a special allure and warmth when at a location that has unique and attractive amenities.”  This article is about the role of “place” as it relates to economic development. Particularly interesting is a chart comparing the old and new economy with respect to place, and tables of examples of “place-based strategies to attract certain target populations and businesses.

In Detroit, where it’s so bad that it’s good, is an extreme example of a city in distress that is struggling in the early stages of regeneration. If you do not accept the notion that plowing Detroit under is the best alternative, redevelopment strategy should include rebuilding the population with new jobs, housing, infrastructure and amenities.

When a city’s population, economy and government is as seriously degraded as it is in Detroit or Flint, a key question is what comes back first, residents or retail? Simultaneous development of housing and services may provide the framework for sustainable re-development.  In Dan Gilbert’s ‘Big Bang Theory’ for Detroit, both have to come on line at the same time.  (See the video: Dan Gilbert’s vision for downtown Detroit retail from Crain’s Detroit Business).

Governor Snyder said recently that Detroit can and should return as a manufacturing based economy that opens its arms to immigrants.  That can be part of the vision that includes elements of a technology or knowledge based economy, and one that is partially “arts-driven” as suggested in “The Economics of Place”.

Soil is a key element of our ecosystem

Matt Power, Editor-In-Chief of Green Builder Magazinewrites in the March 2012 issue about how typical construction practices destroy soil ecosystems during development of new buildings.  Stripping and mass grading, “attack(ing) a piece of land the way a three-year-old goes after a lump of Play-Doh”, typically divides the soil into one pile for topsoil, one pile for subsoil and one pile for sand.  “Abused, misunderstood, poisoned and taken for granted, soils deserve better. They’re essential to life, more complex than you can imagine, and in serious need of stewardship”, Power writes.  And soil ecosystems are very difficult to restore.

Power summarizes soil expert Mark Fulford’s message that “modern society- agriculture in particular- has gone astray.”  Industrial agriculture following WW II is based on mining rather than biology, with the result that crops are “grown in a chemical soup” instead of in soils. 

Typical construction site management reflects the same attitude toward the soil.  Rip it up, pile it up, spread it out, compact it, re-spread soils and top it with turf treated with petroleum based nitrogen. Fulford calls that “carpeting a collapsed ecosystem.” His point is that there is no way to effectively restore the soils that natural processes produce in human terms at an extremely slow rate, at the rate of up to one inch per one thousand years. There is also no way to restore the amount of air in the soil that the roots need to thrive.   

The best way to protect soil ecosystems is to disturb them as little as possible.  A few key points taken from “Sustainable Landscape Construction” by J. William Thompson and Kim Sorvig with a few added comments include:

• Preserve and protect every tree (not usually feasible, so minimize removals)
• Use moveable, pervious pavers (or permeable paving)
• Minimize utility access damage (and think about what kind of backfill material makes sense)
• Plan staging carefully (minimize the limits of disturbance)
• Listen to the weeds.  This refers to “Weeds and Why They Grow”, a classic 116 page guide by Jay McCaman published in 1994.  By reading that, you get a free and quite accurate picture of the real qualities of the soil on a particular site. The idea is that observing which weeds grow where is a highly efficient way of identifying what the soils are lacking.

If soils have to be disturbed, the goals of restoration should include increasing carbon and air content.  Fulford says that increasing soil organic carbon can “sequester enough carbon to get us back to the pre-industrial level…”

Our understanding of soil ecology has evolved but our typical construction practices have not.

Community Colleges:                           Internet Link:

The Michigan State Bidget Office today unveiled a new plan to allow the public to access community college and university annual 5-year plans and capital outlay priority requests.  Architects, engineers and contractors seek these plans of proposed future projects and follow their development.

In past years, each publicly funded Michigan community college and university had to send hard copies of these plans to the Budget Office.  There the plans would be categorized and sent to the legislature for possible funding.  Then the plans would be boxed and stacked and kept on hand.  Now the state has changed the rules and requires that each college and university post their plans on a publicly accessible website.

We thought you’d like to see that list so here is as of February 1, 2012.  Listed below are the links to the state Universities.  Please go to the following post to see the community college links. 

Please note that if the links are broken or otherwise do not resolve, the problem is with the college or university, not the State Budget Office.  Where it says “hardcopy submitted” we guess that institution of higher education didn’t read the directions.

FY 2013 FIVE-YEAR CAPITAL OUTLAY PLANS

Five-year capital outlay plans are required annually from universities and community colleges per the Management and Budget Act, Public Act 431 of 1984, Section 242, as amended.    The FY 2013 plans cover the planning period of FY 2013 – FY 2017.   Per State Budget Office instructions issued on September 1, 2011, institutions may now post their Five-Year capital outlay plans in a searchable electronic format on a publicly viewable location on their internet site.   Institutions are to archive these plans on the site for a period of no less than three years.   The link to the applicable internet site was provided to the State Budget Office by the institution and any technical questions regarding the link should be directed to the institution.

Universities:                                         Internet Link:

Community Colleges:                           Internet Link:

Some zoning ordinances are subject to the rule of unintended consequences. The intent is often not codified in a way that anticipates every possible application of the ordinance requirements. An example is the Ann Arbor Off-street Parking ordinance intended to prevent parking between commercial buildings and adjacent rights-of-way. 

Our client owns a shopping center in a C3/Commercial zoning district with frontage on three public streets. A remodeling project is proposed to construct entries on a blank face of the center and add parking between the building and the street.

City planning staff opposed parking in this location because the “intent” of Chapter 59 is to require buildings to be located close to front property lines with parking in side or rear yards. We argued that the “content” of the ordinance is the controlling factor and that the ordinance includes an exception for sites with multiple frontages.  We submitted a Zoning Compliance Permit Application.

Chapter 59, Section 5:168, item (2) c, describes an exception to the prohibition of parking between the building and the street. “Sites with more than 1 front line; the requirements of paragraph (1) in this section shall apply to only 1 front lot line. For all other lot lines abutting streets, parking shall be located behind the minimum front setback requirement, per Chapter 55 (Zoning).”

That paragraph reads “Vehicular parking structures, lots and space shall not be located in the front open space. No space within a parking structure or lot may be closer to the street than the front face of a building.”

1. The site has frontage on three public streets.

Item (2) c applies and requires that only 1 of the frontage cannot have parking between the building and the street.

The preliminary site concept showed proposed improvements including removal of all parking spaces between the building and one of the other two frontages, one that is functionally a rear yard.  Removing that parking makes that frontage comply with paragraph (1). The front line adjacent to proposed parking no longer has to meet that requirement.

1. The other two front lines are not subject to paragraph (1) and are subject to the requirement that “parking shall be located behind the minimum front setback requirement” which is 10 feet.

The Zoning Compliance Application was approved. The City immediately began the process of changing Chapter 59 to revise the ordinance to require a minimum 25 foot setback rather than the 10 minimum permitted in the C3 district.

We submitted a Site Plan that showed a minimum 25 foot parking setback and that was unanimously approved.

An engineering consultant once told me that signs, speed bumps, and retaining walls are examples of failures in design. If the design is right, those things are not needed.

The US-23/Lee Road round-about traffic controls are an example of design failure. Not only is there a mind bending number of directional signs and pavement markings, but the control devices are different in each of the round-abouts. To navigate them safely, the best path is to ignore the controls, slow down, and watch the other drivers. That is a mental speed bump.

David Engwicht, a “social inventor” in Australia, wrote Mental Speed Bumps.  The Smarter Way to Tame Trafficin 2005, while Hans Monderman, a traffic engineer, was in the Netherlands discovering a radical new way to tame neighborhood traffic: don’t.

The basic idea is that removing all traffic signs, speed bumps, line markings and traffic lights results in reduced traffic speed and greater safety. The lack of traffic controls creates “mental speed bumps.”

“Shared roads” or “complete streets” are now mainstream applications of the social contract we already apply at places like four way stops.  These purposely mix user types within the overall transportation system. Another example of shared use of space is the holiday shopping rush at the regional mall. A flood of vehicles shares an enormous parking area with hoards of shoppers rushing in and out of the mall.  The traffic flow is managed by the interaction between the pedestrians and the drivers rather than by traffic cops or signals, or zillions of directional signs.

Engwicht’s small volume describes the safety paradox, the idea that creating intrigue and uncertainty makes streets safer. That flies in the face of the conventional idea that predictability increases safety.  But predictability leads to increased speed and a lower level of concentration on the part of drivers, cyclists and pedestrians. Add that to distractions like talking on a cell phone, text messaging, listening to music on an iPod, etc. etc. and people are not in the moment, are not aware of or truly experiencing their environment, and are essentially on auto pilot, or as dad would say, “cruisin’ for a brusin’”!

This small volume is “a practical, down-to-earth guide for residents, parents, health professionals, city planners and anyone interested in creating more livable streets.”

Prior to this year, all 43 public community colleges and universities had to submit hard copies of their plans to the Budget Office by December 1.  Then each of these plans were sorted and stored in the Budget Office and copied for anyone interested in submitting a FOIA request.  This was no doubt a burden on the Budget Office staff and copying the documents was expensive for us.  Plus, we needed to either drive to Lansing to pick up the copies or have them shipped to our offices – an expense we may be able to avoid now.

According to Lisa Shoemaker, all higher education institutions now will be required to post their plans to their institution’s website.  Where on their website is unclear.  The  Budget Office will then compile a list of hyperlinks that interested users will be able to access and then go to the individual plans.  Users likely will be able to copy sections of those plans.

Much more efficient!

The one snag is that according to Shoemaker, the list may be a FOIA-able document.  Why, we have no idea.  After all, these are lists of public investments using state tax dollars and should be transparently available.

Shoemaker says the final list of hyperlinks may be compiled by the beginning of February 2012.  We will wait until then to see how the new process unfolds.

Things would go much more smoothly if planning commission and city council members could keep in mind that time is money and that a constantly moving site plan target is very hard to pin down.

The following is from www.annarbor.com, October 12, 2011:

The project called for construction of five buildings on a 15-acre site owned by Grace Bible Church, off South Maple Road near Pauline Boulevard on the city’s west side. It would have included 494 parking spaces, a number far in excess of that required by city code.

When the site plan expired recently after three years without activity, Rampson said the church, acting as the applicant, came in seeking an extension.”And then they found that they were going to have to make significant changes to the plan in order to meet our new codes and opted not to do that,” she said.

Rampson said the developer of the site never exercised its option to purchase the property, and the church was hoping to extend the site plan to make it available to a future developer.

A representative of the church could not be reached for comment.

See the full article from www.annarbor.com here.